It looks bad, I know – I announce with much pomp and circumstance my return to the blogosphere, and then take over a month to produce another post. I can only offer a thousand humble apologies, and explain that first, I was starting a new job, and then I came up against the monopolistic evil of internet provision in London and was cut off for the better part of a month, refusing to shell out for WiFi use in order to disseminate my Marxist-feminist dialectic from the hipster bars of Shoreditch.

The reconnection of my internet did, however, happily coincide with the advent of plenty of material for a new and angry post. This was provided in part by the return to the nation’s screens of the costumed soap opera/SVU mash-up Ripper Street, and in part by a conference on the topic organised as part of Birkbeck’s series of lectures and film showings as counterpart to the Victoriana exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery. I won’t lie – I am as much of an omnibus and crinoline geek as the next Victorian Studies graduate, and can’t help loving the research and creativity that goes into the steampunk genre. ‘Victoriana: The art of revival’ is a gorgeous exhibition and I got childishly excited about dressing up for the neo-Victorian ball in the gallery crypt. Nevertheless, as the (for that evening) consumptive factory worker who authors the Marxism, Desire, Ontology blog pointed out, steampunk, and the entirety of historical fiction as a genre, is inherently reactionary. Like fantasy and science fiction, which offer, through their world-building possibilities, tremendous scope for subversion and breaking down of dominant discourses but practically always end up reinforcing precisely those discourses and presenting them as inevitable and ‘natural’, it thrives on titillation through the depiction of highly problematic ideas and actions without apology or contextualisation, the excuse being a nostalgia for an invented tradition in which political correctness had not yet been invented.

Councillor Jane Cobden – because the focus group says the show needs more women

These were the questions I had hoped to hear addressed at the conference on ‘re-writing the Victorians for TV and radio’. Unfortunately, the conclusion that Ripper Street used its historical setting to present itself as educational whilst incorporating cheap thrills appealing to its viewers’ latent brutality, and the acknowledgment of its frankly appalling gender, race and disability politics, were only stated outright at the very end of the afternoon, when time constraints no longer allowed for a fruitful (or even merely satisfyingly angry) discussion. What did emerge from between the lines of the papers and discussion, however, was a point that I think gives us considerably more cause for concern than merely the threat of rubbish television. This was the model referred to as ‘austerity BBC’. The speaker, Dr Benjamin Poore, used this to explain the decline of the golden era of the BBC adaptation of canonical texts as mini-series: the new model, he made clear, was responsible for the format heralded by Lark Rise to Candleford, which used the source text only as a springboard for a long-running soap opera-style programme. Since it requires only one custom-built set (and we find the BBC’s costume drama outfits regularly recycled) and has no fixed number of episodes, series on this model are cheaper to produce and have the potential to generate greater profits – as, for example, through the success of Downton Abbey.

An established madam – but her bruises were inflicted by another woman

I would argue, however, that there is a more dangerous implication to the workings of this kind of ‘austerity TV’ which is inextricably linked to the reactionary aspects of historical fiction. The third episode in the new series of Ripper Street, nauseatingly entitled ‘Become Man’, confirmed me in this suspicion. Many of the conference-goers pointed out the conspicuous absence of people of ethnic minorities in the first series, and the appearance, out of nowhere, of a substantial Chinese community in the first episode of the second – which promptly proceeded to demonise this community as poisoning the West with its narcotics. A similar argument may be made about the treatment of characters with disabilities in the second episode, which cast these stereotyped characters as completely disconnected from the wider community. In the third episode, a band of hysterical women kidnap the opponent of London’s first female City Councillor. Of course, sensible Councillor Cobden takes resolute distance from these ‘extremists’ whilst playfully embracing the image of herself as a breathily willing object of love and lust; meanwhile, the madam and the women’s ringleader form a mutually abusive and voyeuristically eroticised bond for no reason other than their shared femininity (and implied hysteria). Besides these grating facts, however, it struck me as extremely relevant that these female terrorists were former employees of the Bryant and May Match Factory who were not satisfied by the outcome of the 1888 Matchwomen’s Strike. Following this summer’s Matchwomen’s Festival to commemorate the Strike, and coming in a climate of industrial disputes in a crisis acknowledged to affect women disproportionately, it is impossible not to see this as a deliberate provocation and an undermining of the uniting and unionising of – particularly female – workers.

As I explored in my previous post in the context of modern-day recruitment techniques, the division of the workers along arbitrary lines of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation etc. etc. etc. is a well-worn capitalist tactic to undermine a united fightback. As in the Victorian period with the rise of its propagandist popular press, popular culture is a useful tool to spread these divisions in such a way as to make them seem embedded in ‘human nature’. Because of the reactionary nature of the genre, writers of historical fiction should always make extra efforts to guard against the uncritical adoption of modern-day stereotypes and prejudices in their pseudo-historical setting, but (and how consciously I cannot say with certainty) this brand of ‘austerity TV’ does precisely the opposite by cementing these stereotypes and prejudices – not because it is simply mindless and pretends to be no more, but in a setting that passes itself off as meticulously researched and educational, and thus does worse than excuse these attitudes.

Living in the old East End, where nightly Ripper Tours flood the streets after dark, I can testify to the fact that the shadow of Jack the Ripper has continued to haunt the popular imagination well beyond the bounds of 1888 Whitechapel. And I don’t mind this, per se: despite all the wrong reasons for which he fascinates, there are also a few right reasons to be found, as demonstrated, for example, by Judith Walkowitz in her introduction to City of Dreadful Delight. Therefore, I was actually quite excited to discover Ripper Street: uniting my interest in the Victorian period and my not-always-entirely-guilty pleasure in detective series, it seemed to present quite an intelligent and original, though popular, take on the old concept.

The three (male) protagonists of ‘Ripper Street’

What the show definitely succeeded in doing was proving that a good first episode is enough to hook the viewer – or it hooked me, anyway. The premise of portraying a police force scarred by the events of the autumn of 1888, and a detective doing his utmost to prevent that panic from resurfacing with every similar (copycat?) case, was novel whilst making logical, political and psychological sense. There were just enough hints at backstory to fascinate, and some of the characters were really well chosen and drawn.

However, this very interest in backstory soon got out of hand. Each of the characters had one – one filled with violence, crime and trauma. And while there was obviously a lot of all three around in late-Victorian London, some – or a great deal – of it seemed simply improbable. There could be some explanation for this, arguably, in Engels’s theory of characters and situations as ‘types’: the writers of the show were clearly very aware of the many different political and social issues besetting the East End in the late 1880s, and each episode and each character came to represent one or more. Thus, it made sense to include an episode on the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike, and present the gun-slinging, semi-criminal, ex-Pinkerton Yankee pathologist’s experiences of the Chicago May Day massacre. Nevertheless, often this heightened awareness of historical context spilled over and became excessive, as with this very character’s false name, secret flight, unlikely residence in a brothel, and the vengeful posse pursuing him across the Atlantic. As the show reached the later episodes, the pressure to explain these various confused plot points increased, and resulted in the last two episodes desperately trying to build a story around the tying up of loose ends.

But this wasn’t what made me uncomfortable. The reason I had a recurring sense that I should not be enjoying what I was watching was related to an apparent lack of a sense of the meaning of the historical context and detail as it related to the present day. Thus, for example, the dashing and incidentally murderous antics of the inspector and his sergeant, but particularly the pathologist, eliminated the need for the writers to deal with the problem of corrupt Victorian courts, hideous punishments and execution, but as a result portrayed a primitive and immediate justice of the kind that is so off-putting in some American police series. Although vigilantism is ostensibly judged in the script, often it seemed as though the historical setting served as an excuse to fantasise about a simplistic system of instant trial and retribution which, as a society, I had hoped we had outgrown.

Mrs Reid – the Inspector’s wife…

Another backstory issue that continually got in the way of my enjoyment was the Inspector’s relationship with his wife. The child mortality rate in Victorian London was staggering, so their being driven apart by their different ways of (not) coping with the death of their daughter made sense, as did their both throwing themselves headlong into their work. Emily’s choice of charity work was a logical one considering her class, background and education, and the clichéd addition of her attempt to replace the object of her nurturing. Even the Inspector’s double standard – he is allowed to work and rarely come home or speak to his wife about his grief, but expects her to be constantly emotionally available to him – is not unrealistic, particularly considering the lingering expectations of separate spheres. What stuck in my throat was the show’s way of supporting him in this unreasonable frame of mind by providing him with the nurturing, womanly, motherly ideal in the form of the matron of an orphanage. She, despite her awareness of his wife and her general good sense, unhesitatingly welcomes him into her bed. In terms of the backlash of post-feminism, a regime of cuts that are turning back the clock on women’s achievements and opportunities, and the Tory advocacy of Thatcherite Victorian values, this emphasis on the wife’s work outside the home, to benefit social outcasts, ruining the marriage of the pillar of society that is the Victorian police inspector, is a dangerous one.

Although Ripper Street is an excellent police drama in terms of originality of premise, topics covered and suspense maintained, I was disappointed to see such a clever idea devolve into an unexpectedly simplistic rendition of the modern perception of ‘Victorian values’. On top of that, the choice of protagonist necessarily got on my nerves: as my friend remarked, Matthew Macfadyen really only has one face – and I will never forgive his having stuck that face on Mr Darcy in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Another instalment in the rubric ‘spotting insidious Victorian patriarchy in modern-day society’.

As part of my wonderfully diverse degree, I have recently been doing some work on the Victorian city, which has raised again the age-old question, ‘Can the flâneur be female?’ As a new Londoner and avid (nocturnal) walker, this question soon took on a personal aspect for me – because the answer, nowadays as well as in the time of Baudelaire, is no.

That is not to say it is impossible for lone women to walk through London at night: we can, and indeed we must. And this, of course, was the case for many Victorian women as well: if you worked the insane hours of a sweatshop, for example, you had no choice but to make your way home through dark and unsafe streets. But to argue this would be to miss the point, which is that women do not walk the streets on an equal basis with men (and the pun on streetwalking here is a tragic illustration).

That the streets have yet to be reclaimed always becomes more obvious in the wake of holidays such as New Year’s, when it is once more brought to public attention that the various ‘stay safe’ tips well-meaningly dispensed by police and other institutions – don’t walk home alone after dark, and if you do, let someone know where you’re going etc. etc. etc. – just don’t always apply. Laura Bates of the EverydaySexism project, in her article for the Guardian on the stories shared under the hashtag #ShoutingBack, describes an incident of sexual harassment: ‘Although the police were supportive, the male officer said: “Usually I’d tell you to avoid walking around on your own late at night, but, you know – New Year’s. You have to get home somehow.”’ Yes, we do; and the fact that something as simple as going out with friends and returning home at the end of the night can be such a terrifying experience clearly shows that the streets are not a safe place for women.

This view of the streets is strongly reinforced by the very literature that celebrates the cityscape. I do enjoy reading Baudelaire, but running through his glorious lines and entrancing descriptions is always a sense of owning not only the city and its sights, but its women. The flâneur is a voyeur, and a beautiful woman lays herself open to his gaze simply by being out on the streets. In Ernst van Altena’s Flemish translation of Jacques Brel’s song ‘Le Plat Pays’ (‘Mijn Vlakke Land’), the very line, ‘En elke Vlaamse vrouw flaneert in zonjapon’, which casts Flemish women as flâneuses, immediately links itself to the inescapable male gaze by making the girls in their summer dresses as part of the landscape to be admired.

Arguably, the nearest approach in literature to a female character acting as a masculine flâneur is made by Jean Rhys in Good Morning, Midnight. The protagonist, Sasha, is independent in Paris, visiting her favourite haunts with reference only to her own inclination. She is the same isolated figure in a crowd as Baudelaire, with the same fascination and melancholy – yet with Sasha, this melancholy has a very real basis in the horrific memories of her past which the city evokes. Thus, the city always has her at a disadvantage – even when she withdraws to her hotel, even when she picks up a gigolo, she is subject to the gazes, lusts and judgments of the men around her, with the city as a looming threat. Her way of coping with these judgmental gazes, furthermore, smacks strongly of ‘Au Bonheur des dames’: reinventing herself with new clothes and dyed hair, she retreats from the masculine arcades to the relative safety (though this, too, is fraught with judgment) of the feminine department store. Even in the liberated atmosphere of the interbellum, Sasha cannot attain the freedom and detachment of the nineteenth-century male flâneur exploring the city at his leisure and taking it as it comes.

And this is a terrible deprivation, because the city at night can be a beautiful thing. The beauty of ‘one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one’ (Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five) should not be fraught with anxieties to such an extent that we are no longer able to enjoy it.

Let me tell you where I stand right away. I loved White Teeth. Unequivocally, unconditionally. So now I, as a reader, have placed Zadie Smith in that impossible position of expecting her to repeat her first success, and produce something at once as astonishingly original as that novel, but in the same style, leaving the same feeling of breathlessness and joy and the immediate wish to re-read.

So far, I’ve been disappointed. I did enjoy On Beauty, and probably would have considered it extraordinary coming from another author. From Smith, it wasn’t as good as White Teeth. It was the same with NW. I couldn’t not buy it; I read it in one go; but it wasn’t what I was hoping to find.

I could see she had tried to recreate the diversity of the cast of White Teeth, and each character was deftly drawn, at once fascinating and entirely ordinary. And, unusually, each was rendered in an entirely different writing style. The experience was almost that of reading three or four different books at once, with storylines that seemed casually to touch and overlap. However, at times this fragmentary style overshoots the mark somewhat, in that it interferes with the coherence of the plot. I have always preferred character-driven novels, and will argue the case that, where characters and their interaction are well-crafted, the importance of plot may be negligible. But NW had just too much happen for me to want to let it go as fluidly as the character transitions required. The appearance and disappearance of the stranger who cons Leah may be realistic, but the way she was not let go, whilst no explanation was given about her, just bothered me a little too much.

My main issue, however, did not come till the last part of the book, and was, predictably, with the ill-defined character of Keisha/Natalie. She was entirely understandable, and easy to relate to, while she struggled to build her career, made a good but unhappy marriage, and generally did what was expected of her, until she did the exact opposite. Her ambiguous relationship with her home neighbourhood of NW also made sense – wanting to leave it, and then coming back to a different area in it, still close to her history yet outwardly divorced from it. But I did not understand the cheap solution to this difficulty of making her enter the sex industry. Once the step had been taken, there is room to explore the relevance of her operating under her old name, ‘Keisha NW’ – but I found it very difficult to see why this twist had to be constructed in the first place. In my view, it hints too much at the ‘post-feminist’ discourse claiming the sex industry as empowering for women, and a free choice. Plot-wise, it was too much of a cheap shocker that did not sit well with the realistic psychological portraits of, particularly, Natalie’s childhood friend Leah.

The study of Leah is an item of beauty, its style leisurely and evocative, her motivations and concerns understandable. Natalie, too, although her style is radically different, is brilliantly constructed throughout her section of the novel, precisely because her motivations are not dwelt upon: it suits the character who attempts to erase her history.

Thus, although the character studies approach perfection in their originality and the extent to which they differ from one another, the plot, or lack of it, is what gets this novel down. Perhaps this time, Smith would have done better to have left it out altogether.